Frederick Denison Maurice

Frederick Denison Maurice: The Heretic Who Founded a College

In 1853 the Council of King's College London asked one of its professors of theology to resign quietly. He refused. He demanded to be either acquitted or dismissed. They dismissed him — and within eighteen months he had opened a college for working men that is still teaching. Julius Hare called F. D. Maurice "the greatest mind since Plato." John Ruskin thought him "by nature puzzle-headed and indeed wrong-headed." Both were describing the same man, and Victorian England never quite settled which of them was right.

The Divided House

Maurice was born on 29 August 1805 at Normanston, near Lowestoft in Suffolk, the only son of Michael Maurice, evening preacher at a Unitarian chapel, and his wife Priscilla. The household then proceeded to split along doctrinal lines: his mother and sisters abandoned Unitarianism while remaining Dissenters, leaving the boy, as he later wrote, "much confused between the opposite opinions in our household." He was drawn to the anti-Unitarian side, he said, "not from any religious bias, but because Unitarianism seemed to my boyish logic incoherent and feeble."

It was a formative and permanently marking experience. The great project of Maurice's life — a Christianity whose unity ran deeper than the sects that quarrelled inside it — was born at a family breakfast table where nobody agreed.

Cambridge, London, Oxford

He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1823 to read civil law, co-founded the Apostles with John Sterling, moved to Trinity Hall in 1825 and took a first in civil law in 1827. Then came three years in London and Southampton writing for the *Westminster Review* and editing the *Athenaeum* with Sterling. John Stuart Mill, who knew him then, judged that Maurice and Sterling represented "a second Liberal and even Radical party, on totally different grounds from Benthamism."

At Southampton he abandoned Unitarianism and resolved on Anglican orders. He went up to Exeter College, Oxford in 1830 — older than his fellow undergraduates, conspicuously poor, keeping to himself and toiling at his books — was baptised into the Church of England in March 1831 and took a second class that November. His novel *Eustace Conway* appeared in 1834 and was praised by Coleridge. He was ordained deacon in January 1834, served a curacy at Bubbenhall in Warwickshire, and was priested in 1835. In 1836 he became chaplain of Guy's Hospital, lecturing the medical students on moral philosophy for the next twenty-four years.

The Kingdom of Christ

*The Kingdom of Christ*, published in 1838 and enlarged in 1842, is his central work. Maurice argued that the true church transcends the diversities and partialities of its members, factions and sects, and identified its enduring signs: baptism, the creeds, set forms of worship, the eucharist, an ordained ministry, and the Bible. It was an argument for a catholicity beneath denomination — and it would flow, through William Reed Huntington, into the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral and eventually into the modern ecumenical movement.

He was elected professor of English literature and history at King's College London in 1840, added the chair of theology when the college created the department in 1846, and became chaplain of Lincoln's Inn. In 1847 he and colleagues formed a Committee on Education for governesses; the following year it became Queen's College, London, empowered to certify governesses and open classes "in all branches of female education," with Maurice as first principal. It is generally reckoned the pioneer institution of higher education for English women.

Christianity as the Foundation of Socialism

The year 1848 — revolution across Europe, Chartism at home — turned him outward. From then until 1854 Maurice was the acknowledged spiritual leader of the Christian Socialists, though he cared far more about the theological foundation than the practical machinery. His formula was flat and uncompromising: "Christianity is the only foundation of Socialism, and a true Socialism is the necessary result of a sound Christianity." Competition, he held, was fundamentally unchristian.

From 1849 he threw himself into cooperative associations. Twelve London workshops were planned; many collapsed despite subsidy from Edward Vansittart Neale. By 1854 eight producer cooperatives were running in London and fourteen in the provinces — breweries, mills, tailors, printers — and Maurice chaired the board of the Society for Promoting Working Men's Associations. The movement's most durable achievement was legislative: the 1852 act giving cooperative bodies legal status.

Dismissed

*Theological Essays* appeared in 1853. In it Maurice questioned the doctrine of eternal punishment, holding that God's love was infinite and salvation universally accessible. Combined with his Christian Socialist notoriety, this was enough. At Richard William Jelf's instigation the King's College Council invited him to resign; he refused and forced them to sack him. He then severed his connection with Queen's College to protect it from the fallout.

The public and his friends sided with him overwhelmingly, treating him with the reverence due a great spiritual teacher. In February 1854 he drew up plans for a Working Men's College; it opened on 30 October that year with more than 130 students, Maurice as principal, teaching and superintending personally for the rest of his London life. Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes taught alongside him.

He was appointed to St Peter's, Vere Street, Marylebone in 1860, and on 25 October 1866 — his heresies notwithstanding, indeed cited in his application — he was almost unanimously elected Knightbridge Professor of Casuistry, Moral Theology and Moral Philosophy at Cambridge, where nobody doubted his orthodoxy. In 1870, in failing health, he sat on the Royal Commission on the Contagious Diseases Acts alongside T. H. Huxley, opposing the Acts "firmly and conscientiously… to the very last." He preached his last sermon on 11 February 1872 and died on Easter Monday, 1 April, having just managed to pronounce the blessing after receiving communion.

Why Frederick Is Called a Genius

The quality claimed for Maurice is a rare kind of synthetic vision: the ability to see beneath doctrinal quarrels to the structure they shared, and to draw social conclusions from theological premises that nobody else had drawn. He did not argue that Christians ought to be kind to the poor; he argued that competition was theologically incoherent and that socialism was the necessary consequence of sound doctrine. That move founded a tradition. Julius Hare's "greatest mind since Plato" is the extravagant end of the testimony; Kingsley's "a great and rare thinker" and Bishop John Moorman's judgment that "most modern theology is in some way indebted to Maurice's clear and courageous thinking" are the sober end. Two colleges, an ecumenical formula, and a political tradition all trace to him.

The counter-case is unusually well documented, because his contemporaries said it out loud. John Stuart Mill thought "there was more intellectual power wasted in Maurice than in any other of my contemporaries." Matthew Arnold said he was "always beating the bush with profound emotion, but never starting the hare." Aubrey de Vere compared listening to him to "eating pea-soup with a fork." Newman granted his "great power" and "great earnestness" but found him so hazy he lost interest. M. E. Grant Duff heard him preach thirty or forty times and never carried away one clear idea; students at King's found him unintelligible and left with empty notebooks. Hugh Walker predicted in 1910 that neither of his major books would survive. The fair verdict is that Maurice's genius was generative rather than expository — he could not make himself clear, and the ideas nonetheless proved strong enough to outlive the prose.

Legacy

He wrote nearly forty volumes and married twice: Anna Barton in 1837, who died in 1845 leaving two sons, and Georgiana Hare in 1849. His son Frederick wrote his life. Crowds followed his coffin to Highgate Cemetery, mourners of widely different creeds united by a common loss. The prediction of oblivion proved wrong: since the Second World War at least twenty-three books have been written about him. King's College London, which sacked him, established the F. D. Maurice Lectures in 1933 and a professorship in his name. The Working Men's College still stands. Both the Church of England and the Episcopal Church keep his feast on 1 April.

Achievements

• Held posts at King's College London and University of Cambridge